The third, however, made it to his feet and shifted. Two hundred pounds of black wolf slammed into my chest, claws ripping into my arms. I felt skin tear, and I dropped the pistol in pain. Mary shouted, and my undamaged left hand burst into flame as I punched the wolf in the chest.
The fire around my hands burnt green and white and seared clean through him, carrying my fist with it. One moment, an enraged wolf was trying, very successfully, to rip me to pieces. The next, the corpse of a large fair-haired man with a hole burnt through his chest crumpled to the floor beside me.
I sprang back to my feet, facing the two Mary and I had both shot. One was already healed, though the one I’d shot in the head was still oozing from the bullet holes as he snarled at me.
My right hand was useless; I could feel that the tendons in my arm had been severed by the shifter’s bite. The nimbus of green-and-white fire sparked around my left hand as I snarled back at the two shifters, and they charged me.
I blasted the one I’d met before across the room with a bolt of green flame. The other hit me in my right side, having changed in a large cougar along the way. Claws and teeth tore into my side, and I tried to twist to punch him with my useful hand.
The shifter and I rolled across the floor. His claws tore apart my jacket but bounced off the Queen’s armor underneath, failing to seriously injure me. He still managed to keep me from managing to connect with him with my flaming fist.
Suddenly, the sound of more gunfire ripped through the apartment. One neat, short, controlled burst. Then a foot collided with the cougar on top of me, and the half-naked young lady whose apartment we were fighting in picked the big cat up by his throat and tore him off me.
The cougar bounced across the floor and came back up to all fours. He started to snarl, and then Mary put a second neat burst into his head. His flesh seared as the silver rounds from Mary’s new magazine ripped into him and tore through his chest. He crumpled to the floor, his body returning to human as he died.
I rolled, slowly, back up to check on the third shifter. Mary’s first burst had apparently taken him in the head. There was nothing left of the body above the neck.
26
“GO PUT A SHIRT ON,” Mary told her friend, carefully laying her gun on a couch as she crossed to me, tearing a strip off her shirt to try and bandage my arm.
“I’ll be fine,” I told her. “I do heal.”
“Not as fast as us, and you’ll lose more blood than you can afford first,” she said critically, ignoring my protest and pulling up my shirt to bind the wounds. “What the hell are you wearing?” she asked in a soft voice, running her fingers down the undamaged cloth of the vest under my shirt, now clearly exposed as most of my shirt and jacket had been ripped to shreds around it.
“Orichalcum-runed body armor,” I admitted. “It’s...a gift from a friend.”
“You have impressive friends,” Mary told me dryly, quickly tying the impromptu bandage around my shredded wrist. “And an impressive ability to get yourself mangled.” She inspected my arm, and I winced at her touch. “You’ll live,” she added.
“I appreciate the vote of confidence,” I said, levering myself to my feet with my left hand and retrieving my gun from the floor. “There’s going to be police here any minute—someone will have called the cops.”
“Bodies in my apartment aren’t going to help me keep it,” the young lady we’d come to rescue said, reentering the living room, now dressed in a black sweater. “But yes, the gunfire will have been heard. We need to leave.”
“Do you have anything packed?” I asked.
“No time,” she pointed out, and I had to nod in agreement.
“Jason, this is my friend Holly Fontaine,” Mary introduced us. “Mary, this is my boyfriend Jason Kilkenny. He’s a changeling.”
“Fine, nice to meet you, can we get the hell out of here?” Holly snapped.
“One last thing,” I told them. I stepped over to the closest dead shifter and focused on my hand. I called a carefully shaped burst of flame and turned the body to fine ash. That done, I moved on and ashed the other two bodies as well.
“Less evidence is better all around, I think,” I told the girls as both of them stared at me. “Let’s go.”
I wasn’t sure why my grandfather’s gift was growing more and more powerful, but given that the ability to use faerie fire more and more effectively was probably the only reason I was still alive, I wasn’t going to complain.
Visibly swallowing, Holly led the way out to the stairs. Halfway down the stairs, we heard footsteps coming up, rapidly, and we flattened ourselves against the wall, carefully concealing my blatantly damaged coat and clothes.
Four men clad head to toe in black body armor came charging up the stairs, the one in the lead gesturing us to the side with a brusque “Police, coming through!”
The armored officers kept going up, and we kept going down.
“They’re going to stop us leaving,” Holly whispered. “How are we going to get out?”
“You two can shift and sneak out, can’t you?” I asked.
“I turn into a deer,” Holly told me. “Not so useful for sneaking in the downtown.”
“No,” I drawled slowly as the thought sunk in. “But an awesome distraction to get us out.”
She nodded. “Point. All right.”
We reached the main floor, carefully peering out around the lobby. The lobby was mostly unoccupied, but we could see the police cars, the caution tape and the black SWAT van lined up outside. Four people in normal streetwear had been corralled to the side by uniformed officers.
“We’ll open the door, and then you bolt out,” Mary suggested to Holly, who nodded as her eyes went slightly unfocused.
“Go,” she told us, her voice thickening as her body began to flow.
Mary and I walked to the front door. She did her best to shield the shredded side of my coat from view with her body until we popped the door and stepped out. A uniformed police officer intercepted us almost instantly.
“Sir, ma’am, we’re going to have to ask you to step over here with us for the moment,” he told us. “There’s been an incident in the building and we will have some questions to ask...” He stopped, almost in mid-word, as an absolutely gorgeous white-tailed deer with black highlights through her fur bounded through the door between Mary and me.
“Shit, she’s going to get hit!” were the next words out of the officer’s mouth, and was clearly torn between trying to save the deer and keep us contained.
“Over there, right?” I said helpfully, pointing at where the other civilians were gathered, and then Mary and I started toward the group.
The officer gave me a thankful nod and then joined four of his comrades in trying to corral Holly while a sixth officer pulled out a cellphone and started trying to call Animal Services.
As soon as they were all thoroughly distracted, we turned in the opposite direction and slipped quietly around the corner to where we’d parked the car. A minute or so later, Holly joined us, brushing snow off her jacket.
“Let’s get back to my place,” I told the girls. “Get some hot chocolate and maybe something stronger into Holly.”
AN HOUR LATER, whiskey-fortified hot chocolates were being passed around, and the shock had finally caught up with Holly, who was cradling the mug and kind of curled into herself. Mary sat down next to her on my cheap couch and wrapped an arm around the dark-haired woman.
“What the hell is going on?” I finally asked.
“Darius Fontaine has gone fucking insane,” Holly said harshly as tears began to leak out. “Those men were Clan, they were supposed to be like brothers to me—and they were going to rape and murder me on his orders.”